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10:12 am The iMac - built in isight camera. front row. incredible reception. 10:13 am No other desktop PC can match it. 10:14 am Intel Core Duo. an amazing chip. 10:14 am Intel Processor. 2-3x faster than the iMac G5. 10:14 am Same sizes. 17", 20". Same design. Same features (isight, front row, apple remote), Same price. What's different. 10:15 am Two cores. each one faster than the G5. 10:16 am showing benchmarks. overall 2-3x faster. 10:16 am 10.4.4 is entirely native on Intel processor. All the applications included are universal and native on Intel. 10:26 am 17" iMac, 20" iMac; 2-3x faster. Shipping Today. ... 10:30 am Today - MacBook Pro 10:30 am New laptop computer. 10:31 am No more Powerbook. Intel duo Core. 10:31 am 2 processors in every Macbook pro. 10:31 am 4-5x faster. 10:32 am Fastest notebook ever. 10:32 am Hair thinner than the 17". 10:32 am 15.4inch LCD. bright as cinemas. 10:33 am iSight Camera. 10:35 am IR sensor. Apple Remote. 10:35 am New feature: New Power Adapter is magnetically held in. If yanked, comes right out. 10:37 am 5.6lbs. iSight, Front Row; $1999 1.67 Core Duo; 667 DDR bus, x1600; $2499 1.83GHz. 10:37 am Shipping in February.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Now that a final build of OS X for Intel is about to be in the wild, let's see how difficult it is to get it running on commodity x86 hardware.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Realizing that the stupid laptop is faster than my dual 2.0 G5 powermac, my mood is turning really sour.
MacWorld actually ruined my day! I didn't think my stupid "fast" desktop would be blown away by a LAPTOP. And what is with the goofy name? MacBook? Common.... They should have named it more appropriately: LustBook.
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Steve's definition of "faster" has a history of not jiving with reality. Don't believe his bakeoffs, wait for third-party tests on the released hardware. Myself, I'm more concerned about the resale value of my dual G5 since I'm not sure how long I want to keep it.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Well, the newer machines will be bumpy too. There are going to be lots of compatibility problems! Rosetta my foot. I bet it probably wont be until June at least that things settle down. I wouldn't even recommend 10.4 to my friends until 10.3 came out.
And someone just posed a reason for the name change. The "Power" in PowerBook referenced the PowerPC chip. So in changing the chip they changed the name. So what are they going to call the new Power Mac? "Introducing the new Mac Mac!"
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I wish I had the money for either. I don't at the moment though unfortunately. I'm still stuck with my 2 year old iMac G4.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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Yes, "Power Mac" and "PowerBook" were originally introduced approximately alongside the transition from 68k to PowerPC. Nonetheless, the PowerBook brand was very strong; I bet Steve's marketing people told him to keep "PowerBook" but he would hear nothing of it.
I originally bought my dual G5 with an eye toward expanding and upgrading it so it would last me many years (my target was seven). Macs aren't known for their expandability, but the G5 was more roomy than most in this regard. Now things don't look quite so rosy. I guess I'll just invest what would have been hardware expenditures in home theatre stuff and game consoles.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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You can keep upgrading your PowerMac. Just like with PC's, you'll be doing it with non-Apple vendors though. There are still upgrade options for G4 Cubes and those things weren't built to be upgraded!
"No more 17"?"
There is still a 17" iMac and a 17" PowerBook. In fact, all 3 PowerBooks are still there, and the 17" still starts at $2500. THAT is interesting...
Just removed "(no more PowerBook)" from thread title.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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The likelihood of me being able to find drop-in processor upgrades for my tower is pretty low, and the market for PCI-X expansion cards isn't exactly huge.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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There are a few companies that do processor upgrades. They usually wait until the machines are a few years old though. I don't know if they've started to do G5 upgrades yet. I wouldn't worry though. Unless you need cutting edge hardware, your stuff will be good for many years.
But yeah, it is startling to have a laptop leapfrog speed so much....
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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I don't think those companies will be releasing PPC970 upgrades, because I don't expect IBM to sell them the chips. I might be wrong, though.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Who knows. IBM will certainly keep making them as a version is being used in XBox360. Don't know if that chip will work as a Mac upgrade though.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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The Xbox 360 uses an entirely different chip, a triple-core in-order PowerPC processor called the Xenon. It has very little in common with the PPC970 (G5) beyond the PowerPC Instruction Set Architecture.
IBM uses the PPC970 line in some Linux-based workstation and server products, but they don't seem to have much interest in selling the chips to anyone.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Yeah, it was kind of a stupid name choice... though I think Intel may be aiming to retire the Xeon brand anyway, when they finish phasing out the Pentium brand.
The Xenon has more in common with the Cell (for Sony's PS3) and the Broadway (for Nintendo's Revolution) processors than with anything else IBM or Freescale manufactures. I think it's pretty funny that IBM managed to sell the same core design (though not overall processor design) three times -- to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Phill Schiller (Apple VP of worldwide marketing) said at MacWorld that Apple is fine with people running Windows on their Intel Macs. Interesting. Presumably they won't do anything to prevent it.
So if I do buy an Intel Mac sometime in the future, I'll be able to play Half-Life and Half-Life 2 at long last! Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Apple is ditching OpenFirmware, but MS is also ditching the BIOS. Both are moving to Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) -- Apple in tandem with the Intel switch, MS with Windows Vista.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Dude... They're not that fast. I looked em up on the website. The Macbook is dual core 1.87 Ghz. The G4 powerbooks max speed was 1.67Ghz. And the new iMac is only 2 Ghz Dual core. Which is actually SLOWER than the Dual or Quad G5 models. I don't get it, where is he getting these claims of 2x and 5x speed increases. Is there some unknown measure of speed he's using?
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Steve's bakeoffs have never been reflective of real-world performance. However, there's a lot more to it than actual clockspeed. The Core Duos from Intel do absolutely eat Motorola's G4s alive in real-world performance. The biggest reason for that is bandwidth -- the G4 is hobbled by a 167MHz bus while the Core Duo has a 667MHz bus. Those G4s are data-starved a lot of the time.
Is it faster than the Power Macs? No, the Power Macs don't have that bandwidth constraint. But mobile chips have been Apple's Achilles heel since the Pentium M was released.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Within a given processor family, sure. But this comparison is across processor families.
Even the notion of a chip having one speed is a misnomer -- I can line up processors with extremely low clock speeds that will blow processors with five or even ten times their clock speeds out of the water on certain sorts of operations.
Of course, I can show you how there are Opterons that can beat out older Pentiums over twice their clock speed on nearly any sort of operation -- outperforming another chip by more than a factor of two per cycle is hardly being within a baseline range.
In this case, the Intel chips are the absolute latest generation Intel has, and Intels chips have been beating G5s speed-wise on most operations for a while now. I could easily see these chips being generally about twice as fast as G5s at a somewhat lower clock speed.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I'm not sure I'd go that far, but they're way faster than G4s. The G5 is a solid performer and has the benefit of more bandwidth.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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